The music becomes grating and overbearing as does Herzog's voice which is way paste its sell date but he is too in love with his own voice to hear that. What a waste of an opportunity. Get rid of the "scientists". Why are they in the cave getting in the way of filming the subject matter? They have to be there this one hour the are allowed to film? I wanted to experience the paintings with light approximating the moving torches that the cave painters carried. Instead we get all these concentrated bright spots from flashlight like head lamps from all these annoying scientists ruining every shot. i watched this in 2D. Someone should have told Herzog that if he had just properly and sparingly used the lights that he had we could have gotten an adequate sense of the 3 D of the cave walls from the shadows, as the film fleetingly does, if the light had moved consistently with the camera. He needed a real cinematographer with some brains and visualization ability like the cave painters had 30,000 years ago. As is all too typical, even for Victorian era architecture and furnishings, claimed in the name of science or preservation, but really to boost their importance, people with degrees always want to exclude others without the same degree from seeing things they are preserving. Why did the curator need to be there breathing on everything? Was this a condition of permission to film. She could have explained what we were seeing in voice over later and yielded her breathing damage time to the film crew but she wanted her face in the film. I thought having a boom mic operator was a waste too as was stopping the filming for a room tone type audio recording. This seem to be filmed and lit without any imagination or planning as if it was just any ol' location. Obviously the play of darkness and light coming only from moving torches influenced the way the animals were depicted. Even the scientists present, literally, and some in the future could have learned something from this if it had been lit and filmed to reproduce the way it was experienced by the cave painters.I'll take Herzog at his work that filming access may never be granted again and give him 1 star for squandering the privilege and preventing someone more capable from doing it. As a doc filmmaker over 60 I also feel embarrassed at the thought of being associated with him for that. He needs to retire now.

The images of the 30 or 40-thousand-year-old drawings inside the Grotte Chauvet are absolutely stunning, spell-binding, wondrous. If you're the sort of person who is moved and amazed by this kind of thing, then this is truly your kind of thing! What mars the documentary are three elements: 1) an almost total lack of archaeological/anthropological explanation (and I don't count the pony-tailed ex-circus juggler-turned-archaeologist who barely seems to understand Herzog's ridiculous questions and does his best to respond but still ends up sounding like a French Milhouse Van Houten; 2) a musical soundtrack that is grating, repetitive, irritating, over-the-top, inappropriate, and just plain preposterous (flights of celestial choruses drone as the camera pans over the paintings on the cave walls); and 3) Herzog's inane, pretentious, Euro-trash narration, which comes in at about the intellectual level of a thoroughly stoned junior high student. Just wait for the last few minutes when you get to the part about the albino crocodiles and see if you don't hoot with laughter. The Chauvet Cave is extraordinary; Herzog is a farce.

Werner Herzog, director of stunning documentaries such as Grizzly Man or Encounters at the End of the World but also movies like Rescue Dawn, gains access to the Chauvet Cave, a cave located in France that was discovered in 1994 and since then has been closed with only a restricted group of top scientists having access to it once a year: since it holds 32000 years old paintings created by Paleolithic humans inside, which are by far the oldest ever known. Herzog captures the paintings beautifully while interviewing local scientists ,archaeologists and other characters to help us understand the story of its cave: the paintings creators, when were they exactly painted and what kind of animals inhabited the cave through this millenia span... Herzog tries to, through these paintings, create a time capsule that leads the audience to an imaginary world lost in the past that, inevitably, the man from the 21st century cannot understand. A brilliant soundtrack composed by Ernst Reijseger helps the mood as we see through this fascinating cave, with Werner Herzog's personal touch and taste on the side. Visit thefadingcam blog for more!

Perhaps this was intended as a Monty Python flavored mocumentary of some particularly pompous and solemn History Channel product. If it is, Werner has succeeded brilliantly. It's hilariously Dickensian in its portrayals of slightly loony characters and in throwing around jumbled theses in response to the Really Big Questions: Who are we? What is art? What is that awful music in the background? Will mutated white alligators some day make mocumentaries about us? Herzog and his cast of zanies play around with these gas-filled profundities, while we wait impatiently for some clear, well-lighted shots of those quietly beautiful sketches by our ancestors or some more earnestly scientific speculation on means, motives,and methods of the ancient artists. Instead we keep getting Gallic stereotypes like the sniffy matron d'cave guide who scolds the crew, reminding them not to step off the gangplank because their stupid boots will tramp out the 10,000 year-old footprints of a cave bear and then pauses to insist (rather too eagerly)that an indecipherable lump of rock shows a minotaur or something molesting the lower part of a woman's...well, you get the picture: the world's oldest cave porn. Then there is the paleo-reenactor who demonstrates the art of operating an atl-atl spear-sling, apparently attempting to fatally impale a grape arbor. Or do you prefer the archivist who shows us his collection of pendulous paleo-Venus carvings. One in particular he seems exceptionally fond of, not enough to marry perhaps, but at some point one expects he's about to say, "Could you all just please leave my lab now? We want to be alone." Eat you heart out Mel Brooks. Don't even get me started on the nice old guy who informs us he was once the Master of All French Perfumers or some such and who now wanders the wilds so he can sniff his way into promising holes in the ground, where he asks others to join him in smelling the essences of our deodorant-innocent ancestors. At one point he seems to get quite confused, staring into the camera as if to ask, "Am I ready for my close up now, Mr. Herzog?" All this is great for evoking chortles, of course, but there is such beauty in these caves (look at the haunting portrayal of the four expressive, individualized horses, for instance)that one wishes a more down-to-earth (pun intended),less artsy director had made a documentary on the subject.